Skip to main content

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

11
  • 1
    Okay, source linked. It does indeed give a source for those market figures in turn: Report of the BBC Technical Study Group, 3 October 1983, File T62/233/1. Commented Dec 27, 2023 at 20:38
  • 1
    'if that software isn't already in ROM' - Typo, I think, you meant 'is already...'? Commented Dec 27, 2023 at 20:39
  • 1
    'And such a solution wasn't uncommon. It worked fine on an 1 MHz Apple 2, half the speed of a BBC.' - ah, not quite. The Apple II 80-column mode used character cells, so required 1/8 the amount of RAM, and 1/8 the amount of data for the CPU to shove around to update the screen. Commented Dec 27, 2023 at 20:41
  • 2
    @rwallace that's a whole sentence: "14 KiB of RAM are quite fine to hold the software and text - if that software isn't already in ROM". Second, Apple II 80 character cards do not need any main RAM as they got their own. more important this is as well to be read in context to using a graphics mode for text display, which Apple offered with the HRCG as part of the 1980 (Applesoft Toolkit](archive.org/details/applesoft-toolkit). Point here is that even a 1 MHz CPU drawing all text as graphics didn't really feel slow. (Thought it being pretty clear. won't mind better wording) Commented Dec 27, 2023 at 22:12
  • 5
    Wordwise seems to have often been used in 40-column teletext mode, it not being a WYSIWYG text processor. I used the competing Acornsoft View, which was WYSIWYG, in mode 3 for a lot of writing, and found it very effective. There was a limit on document size, but I wasn't writing novels. Both of these came as "sideways ROMs" so the program didn't take up RAM. Commented Dec 27, 2023 at 22:20